Ed Park at Bookforum:
THIS IS A GOTHIC TALE. In the summer of 2002, a professional illustrator and single mom in Chicago went to her fortieth-birthday bash, a gypsy-themed affair that her young daughter told her not to attend. A premonition? At the party, a mosquito bit her. Perhaps she slapped it dead; maybe it stayed attached, vampirically feasting. The result was no mere itch, but a health spiral. She had contracted West Nile disease, in a city very far from either side of that river, plus meningitis and encephalitis, paralyzing her lower body. Her drawing hand no longer worked: her livelihood was at stake. She moved in with her mother, whose dining room could accommodate her hospital bed and wheelchair, and enrolled in the fiction writing program at the Art Institute of Chicago. There were stories she wanted to tell. Maybe she’d revisit an abandoned screenplay from the ’90s, about “a werewolf lesbian girl being enfolded in the protective arms of a Frankenstein trans kid.”
She also took a comics class, falling hard for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (She used to love cartoons, and would copy strips from the paper with alarming facility; why had her interest waned?) At her daughter’s urging, she forced her muscles to relearn how to draw, duct-taping a quill pen to her afflicted hand. In time her powers came back. She started a graphic novel, turning her little lycanthrope into a freakishly charismatic narrator-illustrator: ten-year-old Karen Reyes, uptown Chicagoan and magical thinker.
more here.
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